Henry’s independence has continued to grow over the past week or so. Exercise has helped him (and me) and having Eo under better control has helped both of them. There hasn’t been food involved, but they haven’t gotten aggressive except during playtime in a while.
Eo, by the way, is pretty much “healed” from the surgery, and now we need to start the physical therapy recovery process. I’m allowing her to be mobile but keeping her on Tramadol for the time being so that she can get used to moving around again without constant pain. I’d like to start
I dropped Henry’s prozac dose from 55mg/day to 40mg/day last week. This week, Henry has wet his crate two or three times, but that used to be a twice-a-day thing. It’s not. His water consumption is up, which means that he’s probably stressed during the day. There aren’t any chew marks on the inside of the crate as far as I can tell, though.
As Henry becomes more independent and in general happier, we’re having to train some things that previously came natural. For instance, off-leash heeling. He comes well when called (because he knows he gets a treat, duh!) and will generally stay close, but without the ever present anxiety if he gets too far from me, his hound dog nose will now sometimes take over and he’ll get lost in la-la land. I might have to train a heel. Other than that, the basics of the obedience stuff that Jennie taught me have stuck even though I’ve been horrible about practicing them while I’ve been out working on the garden.
Our motto with Henry is “A little bit each day”… actually, with Eo’s hips, that goes for her too right now. We’ve overcome a big struggle for Henry: his toenails.
They’re long. And they’re hairy. They click and clack and they’re very sensitive. A month ago, he wouldn’t let me even hold his paw to trim them without a major tug-of-paw battle that usually ended up with me having trimmed a sum total of two nails and the two of us having skated across the entire wood floor in the kitchen and the living room (the entire length of the house sometimes!) as he struggled to get away and I struggled to hold on to a paw long enough to get ONE snip of the trimmers. It’s clear that, along with everything else, nail trimming day used to be a traumatic event for poor ol’ Henry. (If, on his limited nutrition diet, he even managed to grow more nail regularly.) His nails are black, and I can imagine that he’s been quicked a lot.
And don’t even start with me about the joy of nail trimming with Dremels. The second he hears the Dremel box, he’s hiding.
We started doing one claw a day sometime about three weeks ago, with a treat after each “snip” — and now he’ll sit still for an entire paw, as long as he gets a treat after each nail. He knows where the bread is buttered! Pushing him too much will still set us back, though.
I’m planning to keep up a regular routine/rotation of doing one paw every other day for the next month or two. Not having a giant fight on my hands with a wiry, springy 55 lbs dog every time I want to touch one of his paws is a giant bonus in my book.
I’ve got the sniffles. It’s been an all weekend kind of thing, and staying up for KM’s roast apple pork shoulder on Saturday night didn’t really help any. I feel dehydrated, my nose is running like a faucet, my lymph nodes are all swollen up, and the rest of me is just plain blah.
We didn’t do much this weekend, but tonight was Eo’s first walk since the hip surgery. It’s cold out, and I waited until an hour or two after her dinner to make VERY sure that the Tramadol had taken effect before we went outside. I walked Henry around the block to get his wigglies out, and then we grabbed Eo and I walked her just holding her collar to make sure she was putting weight on the back legs. We only got down one door and then across the street and down three before she started letting out a little “peep” with each step, so we turned right around and went in — but it’s a start. We’ll slowly start increasing the distance a little bit each day.
Henry’s coming along really well, but it’s so easy to confuse him if I don’t have the right idea in my head. I can tell him to “get close”, but if I’m not leaning back, he doesn’t get close enough to get the treat and has to scoot forward on his butt.
To try and make training more of a “habit”, I’ve scattered pouches of fruitables around the house, and we’ll dive into random training sessions all of a sudden. I also am using Zuke’s Minis, lunch meat, and other stuff for longer training sessions. I’ll try to do one longer session a day where we try hard to make doing something ten times a whole lot of fun, and then we’ll do random “checks” using the fruitable caches around the rest of the house.
January already. Sheesh. Can you believe it?
In December, I slacked off seriously on Henry’s training and exercise. Both of us have gotten fat as a result. We started to rectify that yesterday with a nice long walk. We’ll do another couple mile walk tonight. I’m in the market for a good pedometer that works with Mac … I might end up with the nike/ipod unit but would prefer something a little more broadly applicable. I’m gonna look pretty silly wearing my iPod everywhere.
Jennie came over at lunch today and helped Henry and I get started on more training exercises that they use in formal obedience classes, which she just started doing a year ago. Henry did GREAT (even if I screwed up half the time) and it’ll just be a matter of repetition. Unfortunately, I’ve got a consulting gig coming up that’s going to crunch my time at home. Walking and training breaks should be good for relieving stress.
With the walk last night and the training at lunch today, Henry didn’t wet his crate today for the first time this week (Which is the first week I’ve been back since I got home at Christmas.) Talk about milestones. 
Wow. We had a great day today. First, Eo and Henry stayed in their crates all day. As far as I can tell, Henry did not leave a giant puddle of drool in his crate. Eowyn didn’t act aggressive towards Henry at all, and she didn’t carry on for a huge long time when it was time to go for a walk. And the best was yet to come — the feeling I had when we were done with that walk.
The walk started out as a disaster. Every last thing that Eo is reactive to, from joggers to other dogs, arrived at once, right as we went out the door. And every time I got her calmed down again, another one would appear. I almost turned around and went back in — especially when I saw the woman walking the hellaciously reactive border collie that lived at the end of my block towards me. I know for sure that I let a few choice words escape my lips. (In a calm, quiet tone, of course.)
I’m not sure if tonight was the culmination of two YEARS of training Eowyn, or if it was just that I got REALLY stubborn and pissed off at the dogs, and managed to focus and control the seething grumblies in a way that led to success. Either way, I managed to do the “dances with dogs” training exercise tonight to a point where not only were both dogs doing it and doing it well, but we were actually having fun with it! Eowyn was heeling on lead (a first!) and only halfway reacted when a woman with some other dogs was walking them out to get the mail.
(For those not following along at home — Dances With Dogs is what I call the “lots of quick direction changes” training — it’s intended to teach a dog that consistently pulls and doesn’t watch the handler to heel on lead. Eowyn has pulled since the day she was born. Tonight was the FIRST night I have ever had her watching me and ignoring other people, dogs, and for ’scary things’ to jump out from under every car.)
The change was in my attitude. I don’t know how to describe it, but we’ve been working a lot on “calming” activities recently. I’ve been working to control my behavior, and I’ve been working to get the dogs to reliably get excited or slow down. The purpose of any command from the handler should be to calm the dog and focus their energy on the task at hand. (Thank you, Jennie.) That’s what I’ve been missing all these years. Sheesh.
Started with the clicker training again. Spent five minutes with Henry and Eo each. Just simple stuff, working with Henry and Eo on not being grabby with food and treats to refresh the click-and-treat. Henry’s getting it for the first time, but is SUCH a fast learner (really, he’s easy to please … Eo couldn’t care less unless there’s food) that I didn’t have to do much with him.
As for the exercise that we’re using to get back into clicker training, I’m briefly using this post from dogforums.com — Doggy Zen — to provide some basic structure to Eo and Henry’s training sessions.
Need to get more pupperoni or some chicken lunchmeat tomorrow.
Eo was reactive again. And very highly so. Something happened when we went out the door of the house that caused her to bite Henry about the ears and neck again. It had something to do with him going through the door before her. After that, he was afraid to go through doors. I let half the moth and mosquito population in Brazos County into my house while we worked on walking through doors on a leash… first with the door open, and then with the door closed and a sit-and-wait. However, Henry came out of it going in and out of doors just fine, and Eo didn’t react further once I took control of the situation. Must do more work to try to figure out what’s causing the reaction.
We walked about a mile and a half, covering the entire neighborhood. I really need to drive it one of these days to figure out the exact length.
Walking is still the only training period due to other commitments.
Both dogs had lots of energy tonight… I got home early at 4 when it was raining and they slept most of the time until 9pm when we walked. We walked for 20 minutes. They really had a lot of energy and I would’ve kept going, but I was being eaten alive by mosquitoes.
Due to her high energy state, Eo was highly reactive. She barked at three cars.
I tried walking them on different sides of my body tonight. The night before, they had walked on their regular sides and had been very well behaved. Walking on different sides kept them from really knowing what to do. Eowyn walked very close to my side, which helped with the reactivity. I ended up doing the “reverse” correction far more often than I had to the night before.